Read Moon Is Always Female for Free Online

eaten. All
    things have their uses
    except morality
    in the woods.

     September afternoon
     at four o’clock
    Full in the hand, heavy
    with ripeness, perfume spreading
    its fan: moments now resemble
    sweet russet pears glowing
    on the bough, peaches warm
    from the afternoon sun, amber
    and juicy, flesh that can
    make you drunk.
    There is a turn in things
    that makes the heart catch.
    We are ripening, all the hard
    green grasping, the stony will
    swelling into sweetness, the acid
    and sugar in balance, the sun
    stored as energy that is pleasure
    and pleasure that is energy.
    Whatever happens, whatever,
    we say, and hold hard and let
    go and go on. In the perfect
    moment the future coils,
    a tree inside a pit. Take,
    eat, we are each other’s
    perfection, the wine of our
    mouths is sweet and heavy.
    Soon enough comes the vinegar.
    The fruit is ripe for the taking
    and we take. There is
    no other wisdom.

     Morning athletes
      for Gloria Nardin Watts
    Most mornings we go running side by side
    two women in mid-lives jogging, awkward
    in our baggy improvisations, two
    bundles of rejects from the thrift shop.
    Men in their zippy outfits run in packs
    on the road where we park, meet
    like lovers on the wood’s edge and walk
    sedately around the corner out of sight
    to our own hardened clay road, High Toss.
    Slowly we shuffle, serious, panting
    but talking as we trot, our old honorable
    wounds in knee and back and ankle paining
    us, short, fleshy, dark haired, Italian
    and Jew, with our full breasts carefully
    confined. We are rich earthy cooks
    both of us and the flesh we are working
    off was put on with grave pleasure. We
    appreciate each other’s cooking, each
    other’s art, photographer and poet, jogging
    in the chill and wet and green, in the blaze
    of young sun, talking over our work,
    our plans, our men, our ideas, watching
    each other like a pot that might boil dry
    for that sign of too harsh fatigue.
    It is not the running I love, thump
    thump with my leaden feet that only
    infrequently are winged and prancing,
    but the light that glints off the cattails
    as the wind furrows them, the rum cherries
    reddening leaf and fruit, the way the pines
    blacken the sunlight on their bristles,
    the hawk flapping three times, then floating
    low over beige grasses,
                                      and your company
    as we trot, two friendly dogs leaving
    tracks in the sand. The geese call
    on the river wandering lost in sedges
    and we talk and pant, pant and talk
    in the morning early and busy together.

     The purge
    Beware institutions begun with a purge,
    beware buildings that require the bones
    of a victim under the cornerstone, beware
    undertakings launched with a blood
    sacrifice, watch out for marriages
    that start with a divorce.
    To break a champagne bottle over the prow
    of a boat is prodigal but harmless; to break
    a promise, a friendship much more exciting
    (champagne doesn’t squeal); but doesn’t
    the voyage require a lot of sightseeing
    and loot to justify that splatter?
    Give it up for me, she says, give him
    up, give her up, look only in my eyes
    and let me taste my power in their anguish.
    How much do you love me? Let me count
    the corpses as my cat brings home mangled
    mice to arrange on my doormat like hors d’oeuvres.
    But you know nobody dies of such executions.
    Your discarded friends are drinking champagne
    and singing off key just as if they were happy
    without you. One person’s garbage is another’s
    new interior decorating scheme. If she is your
    whole world, how quickly the sun sets now.

     Argiope
    Your web spans a distance
    of two of my hands spread
    turning the space between unrelated
    uprights, accidental neighbors, fennel, corn
    stalks into a frame. The patterned web
    startles me, as if a grasshopper
    spoke, as if a moth whispered.
    The bold design cannot have
    a predatory use: no fly,
    no mite or wasp caught by